General Guidelines for Mobile App Development

Introduction

These mobile standards and guidelines have been established for the development of Singapore Management University branded mobile applications and to ensure a high quality, accurate and consistent delivery of mobile content to the staff, students, and the public. Mobile applications affiliated with the university should look professional, work well, and appropriately represent the University's values.

The university currently maintains a presence on the Apple App Store, Google Play Store, and the Windows Phone Store. To be considered for inclusion of the following distribution channels, all mobile applications must adhere to the guidelines stipulated in this section.

The guidelines and best practices outlined in this section applies to all mobile development that is produced both internally by the University, students, faculty, staff, and alumni, as well as externally by partners and vendors, with respect to standards, content, presentation and technology used.

Online Distribution Channels

This section pertains to all the mobile applications that are branded as Singapore Management University, and are intended to be delivered through the university’s distribution channels (e.g. Apple App Store, Android Google Play, Microsoft Windows Phone Store, Blackberry App World) and/or supported in any capacity by the University.

All mobile applications created to represent the Singapore Management University will comply with the university's visual identity, branding standards and guidelines. The developer is also responsible for furnishing all the required assets (e.g. Name, description, keywords, screenshots) as mandated by the respective channels. Please refer to the respective sub-pages on the detailed requirements and assets for each of the following channels (iOS, Android, and Windows Phone).

The university reserves the right to decline or reject a submission if it does not adhere to any of the guidelines stipulated in this page, or does not further the mission of the university or provide a clear benefit to the community.

Quality Assurance

All submissions will be reviewed to ensure that the mobile applications adhere to the following standards:

It conforms to the guidelines stipulated by the respective distribution channels

It conforms to the guidelines stipulated by the university

It does not exhibit any errors or clash unexpectedly

It does not exhibit any user interface glitches

The user experience is consistent throughout the entire application

All graphical assets are aesthetically pleasant and catered to devices with high resolutions

Developers are to ensure that their mobile applications do not reference and leverage any private or reserved APIs, as well as other third party SDKs that might do so or compromise the integrity and security of it.

Vulnerability Assessment

All submissions require that its source codes be submitted, which will be subjected to an industry-standard code scanning to seek out and identify any security flaws and known vulnerabilities. This includes all other supporting services (e.g. Scripts, Web Services) developed to support the operation of the mobile application. A report detailing any potential exploits will be generated and the developer is required to resolve the risks identified, before submitting to the respective channels.

All subsequent updates to the mobile application will also be subjected to the vulnerability assessment to ensure consistency and prevent any risks or vulnerabilities that might have been introduced.

Maintainability and Ownership

The developer of the mobile application is responsible and shall commit to supporting it with content and any necessary development during the period it remains published in the distribution channels. The developer is also responsible for resolving any bugs that was uncovered and/or reported by users in the current version of the mobile application.

Until the mobile application has been decommissioned from all distribution channels, the developer is required to publish timely updates to support the latest major operating systems by the manufacturer (e.g. iOS 7, Android KitKat 4.4, Windows Phone 8). The developer is also responsible for ensuring that it runs on any service releases and iterations of the current operating system.

For any mobile application that is being developed on behalf of a faculty or unit, the administration of that faculty or unit must be fully aware of, and in full support of, the application's development as well as all its subsequent updates.

The university owns the mobile application if you're a student or staff member and you have used university resources to build it through your employment at the university.

Certificates and Provisioning

All developers are required to submit the full source codes for the mobile applications to be published to the distribution channels. Following a successful vulnerability assessment and quality assurance, the mobile application will be signed using the University's certificate and credentials for submission to the distribution channel.

In cases where the source codes could not be made available, the university may, at its discretion on a case by case basis, provide the developer with the production certificates to sign the mobile application. The signed binary is then published to the respective distribution channels by the university.

Guidelines for specific platforms

Please refer to the following links for the detailed guidelines and requirements for each of the listed distribution channels: